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Have the Cake and Eat It

Lau Nai-keung

According to the police figures, this year’s June 4 anniversary rally reached a record figure of 113,000. To the dissidents this is an encouraging sign that their July 1 will see a reversal from their recent low. Hong Kong anticommunist sentiment and the dissident movement come hand in hand, but in the past few years they do not care to hide this connection. Where will this lead us?

June 4 anniversary rallies are only popular in Hong Kong, and anticommunism faded elsewhere after the Cold War. It is clearly a Hong Kong phenomenon and there must be a local foundation for that, or as Premier Wen Jiabao observed, this might be one of the SAR’s “deep-rooted problems”.

Put it simply, many people in Hong Kong still resist to be integrated into the country. When the future of Hong Kong was raised by the British in the early 1980’s, China was gradually coming out of the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution and experimented shakily with the idea of reform and opening up. The mainstream reaction in Hong Kong then was to maintain the status quo, acknowledging China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong but let the British carrying on governing the territory. After a long and painful negotiation, the British signed a Joint Declaration with China in 1984 and agreed to hand over Hong Kong in 1997.

Immediately mass immigration of the middle class started, and the exodus escalated after the Beijing crackdown on June 4, 1989. At its peak, it was estimated that nearly 1 million or some 20% Hong Kong citizens had foreign passports. For those who could not emigrate, there was constant worry of another Cultural Revolution or June 4 crackdown taking place in Hong Kong after the handover. The last colonial governor Chris Patten fuelled the hope of countering Beijing influence by giving Hong Kong’s infant democratic development a turbo boost. To this day, many people still believe democracy is their ultimate protection from Beijing.

Come 1997, and many of the worries did not take place after the handover and the establishment of the SAR. Local citizens stopped leaving, and a large majority of emigrants returned and they became voters. To many citizens Hong Kong is still the best place in the world to live in; they dig in and try their best to keep the habitat most suitable to their living style.

Soon the idea of Hong Kong’s core value was constructed out of nowhere to differentiate itself from the mainland which to the believers is an undemocratic land of barbarianism and corruption. Any self-respecting Hongkonger should fight with his life to protect its core value from the infringement of the mainlanders. Dissidents coagulate and expand through successive social mobilizations and have become one of the major political forces in Hong Kong.

Extreme proponents recently proposed we cut off from the mainland, give up economic development and concentrate on agriculture. You can laugh at their naiveté, but at least it is honest and logical. For the rest of the dissidents, they want to have the cake and eat it. Economically they know Hong Kong has to link up with the mainland, but politically they want to do their thing without any interference from Beijing. Such wishful thinking ambivalence has led to the present predicament Hong Kong is now facing. Taking a staunchly anticommunist attitude and regularly launching further and bigger confrontations with the central government can only ruin Hong Kong.

One Country, Two Systems is a design for the co-existence of two opposing ideologies. It will not work if one side holds an antagonistic towards the other. Our dissidents will have to learn this fundamental fact.

[article for scmp]